Wave of Hope: African American Youth Use Media and Engage More Civically, Politically Than Whites

Abstract

The study is based on a multi-wave panel survey on media use, and political and social attitudes among 12- to 17-year-olds. The results show that African Americans were more likely than Whites to engage in civic activities, politically participate in online and offline settings, take part in political consumerism, talk about news, follow the news, and demonstrate overall interest in news. This suggests that race is a complex, influential characteristic affecting youth behavior.

KEYTERMS:

• civic engagement
• media usage
• political participation
• race

The collection of the data presented here was undertaken by a consortium of communication and political science faculty from six major universities: University of Arkansas (Todd Shields and Robert Wicks), University of Kansas (David Perlmutter), University of Michigan (Erika Franklin Fowler) University of Missouri (Esther Thorson), University of Texas (Dustin Harp and Mark Tremayne), and University of Wisconsin (Barry Burden, Ken Goldstein, Hernando Rojas, and Dhavan Shah). Dhavan Shah organized scholars and served as the principal investigator for this survey panel. These researchers are grateful for the support received from the following sources: The Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics at the University of Arkansas; the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications and the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of Michigan; the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri; the University of Texas Office of the Vice President for Research; and the Hamel Faculty Fellowship, the Graduate School, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the supporting sources or participating faculty.

An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Asssociation for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Boston in 2009.

Notes

Notes. N = 988; df = 858 (for partial correlations). Table top diagonal: Zero-order correlations. Table bottom diagonal: Partial-order correlations (controlling for gender and income).

***p < .001.

Notes. N = 102; df = 88 (for partial correlations). Table top diagonal: Zero-order correlations. Table bottom diagonal: Partial-order correlations. (controlling for gender and income).

**p < .01. ***p < .001.

Notes. N: 872 Whites, 92 Blacks. Cell entries are standardized Beta coefficients.

^# p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

The exact questions were the following: “During the past 6 months, how frequently during the past 6 months you, have engaged in this activity: (a) Boycotted products or companies that offend my values; (b) bought products from companies because they align with my values.”.